Greta Gerwig’s Gmail Thinks She’s Pregnant and That She Loves Porn

Greta Gerwig stands onstage in a blushing pink nightie, the kind that’s supposed to sex you up, but really only makes you look like a suddenly enlarged Alice in Wonderland. Her character, Becky, is pregnant, and she’s desperate for her crunchy, origin-of-meat-obsessed husband to, well, sex her up. He won’t. (He says he doesn’t want to kill the baby.) And that’s the crux of The Village Bike, a darkly funny play by British playwright Penelope Skinner(her first critically acclaimed play was Fucked), directed bySam Gold for MCC Theater at the Lucille Lortel in New York City. The show has been extended through July 13, so now’s your chance to grab tickets.

After Becky acquires a bicycle to presumably burn off all of her sexual energy, she ends up biking right back to the local weirdo who sold her the bike and igniting an affair inspired by her husband’s porn collection—it’s violent, loud, kinky, and degrading. And you know it isn’t going to end happily ever after. Scenes transition with the sounds of women moaning synced with a few clubby beats, and we felt a little embarrassed for the old women in the theater, in town for the evening to see that sweet girl from Frances Ha in her first Off-Broadway performance.

We spoke with Gerwig about the aftermath of watching a ton of porn, getting used to wearing a tiny nightgown onstage, and audiences that don’t laugh at your jokes.

VF Hollywood: How did you prepare for the role? Did you read pregnancy books or Harlequin romances?

Greta Gerwig: I watched a lot of porn and I read a lot of pregnancy books. Google thinks I’m pregnant, my Gmail thinks I’m pregnant, and also that I really like porn. I spent a lot of time looking for porn of women actually having orgasms, which was sort of hard to find. There’s lots of porn on the Internet, but it became a mission—are there real orgasms? I found some that I felt, to me, seemed not performative, so it’s weird. Porn’s weird.

Harlequin romances, the books, are a huge industry, too.

I totally understand that. I think that’s why whenever someone makes a genuinely romantic movie, it’s a monster. Because there’s a huge market for incredible romance. I don’t need it to be straight. I think the most romantic movie I’ve ever seen is Brokeback Mountain. When he touches the shirt at the end! Gorgeous, gorgeous romance.

I noticed that different groups of people in the audience laughed at different lines in the play—do you hear that when you’re acting?

It is really interesting. Every night is different. Some nights we get zero laughs. It’s so awkward! But then it becomes sort of amazingly hysterical for me, inside, because there’s something about doing things that are supposed to be funny and nobody’s laughing—it’s great because it makes you feel like you’re earning some right to call yourself a show person. There’s something about it—that immediate failure—and knowing that it’s going badly and having to keep doing it, and do it knowing you’re not going to get the laugh.

There will be certain audiences that seem particularly gleeful about her downfall, in a way that’s kind of creepy. Some nights it feels like they’re with Becky and they’re upset for her, and other nights they can’t wait to watch her burn. It’s such an odd thing to feel. People are laughing and your life is getting destroyed. In that way, it’s very human, and I like it; it fuels what feels like the cruelty of it is, which is very useful to me as an actor. It goes both ways. The audience hugely influences my experience of it every night. And I think it should. You’re not doing it in a vacuum, you’re doing it with them.

Tell me about the costumes in the play, they seem to get shorter and shorter, and more revealing.

I’m wearing a very massive bra that makes my breasts look voluptuous. I started wearing that nightie in rehearsal pretty early, because I knew I’d be embarrassed, and I had to get over everyone seeing it. I slowly got used to it. We were playing with not just shortness, but also color, and does it get warmer? Does it get crazier? And how embarrassing it is to be wearing? There’s a scene where I show up at Oliver’s [the bike seller] house at the end of the play in just a nightgown, but we realized it’s much more humiliating if you show up in a nightgown and you have your shoes on. It makes it worse. It’s things like that that I find heartbreaking, and I kind of hold on to.

After you watched so much porn for the role, did you find yourself seeing men in a different way?

Kind of. [Laughs] You know what’s funny? I think Becky—in the beginning of the play, when she’s looking at the porn films—which almost seems quaint now, these DVDs from the 90s—what’s interesting about her, she’s really into the story, and the storyline. And I totally relate to that. I found myself much more interested in erotic fiction than hardcore shots of like, balls. Her investment in the stories is where she tries to find her agency in it somehow.

Thanks for talking to me about watching porn—I know it’s a weird topic.

Nothing feels weird to me now; it’s all on the table because I’m living through it.